Yesterday, scientists called for a drug
database, to monitor the effects of individual pharmaceutical drugs
on the public. It makes sense and I am in agreement with it. God
willing, a database can help prevent
medical tragedies. In the Judiciary Report articles

November 21, 2009 I made reference to the many complaints I found online
regarding the terrible drug Topamax and its generic evil twin
Toprimate, whose horrible side effects include Acidosis, as some
sites such as www.medications.com currently offer public feedback. In the
July 21, 2009 article
Celebrity Prescriptions,
I also wrote of the need for a comprehensive drug computer system to
prevent the abuse of prescription meds.

By and large, most drug makers are not criminally negligent and
knowingly releasing bad products, but some are and measures need to be taken to
weed out those faulty, potentially deadly medications as soon as possible, since
some companies will not police themselves. Most scientists mean well. When a scientist develops a cure, he
or she is not usually thinking of how much money they will make, but how many
people's health and lives will be improved.

Public Database Is Urged to Monitor Drug Safety

Published: November 23, 2009 - What could be done to prevent another Vioxx? This pain medication for
arthritis became a blockbuster after its introduction in 1999, only to be
taken off the market in 2004 when a study linked the drug to an increased
risk of heart attack and strokes.

A new study published Monday in Archives of Internal Medicine offers an
ambitious proposal to determine a drug’s risks sooner than they might
otherwise become evident. The authors propose a system to examine widely
prescribed drugs through safety analyses that would pool data as they emerge
from various clinical trials of a medication and aggregate the information
for a fuller picture of a drug’s harms and benefits.

As policy makers in Washington push for various forms of evidence
gathering to determine the safety and effectiveness of medical treatments,
the study proposes a broad model for monitoring drug safety that would
consist of detailed publicly available data that independent researchers
could freely analyze.

Such a database could be continually updated and aggregated with new
information, as the results of new studies were published, to calculate a
near real-time balance sheet of a drug’s risks and benefits.

Dr. Joseph S. Ross, the lead author of the study, said the objective of
the researchers was to determine whether this kind of sequential cumulative
analysis could serve as a new model for monitoring the safety of drugs after
they enter the market.

“How could we be doing post-market surveillance in a better way?” said
Dr. Ross, an assistant professor of geriatrics and palliative medicine at
Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan. “For drugs that we are
concerned about, that are high risk, this could be a blueprint going
forward.”...

“There is this kind of dogma in medicine that you shouldn’t use any drug
for the first seven years after it’s released, because it takes that long to
figure out its harms and benefits,” said Dr. Michael Steinman, an assistant
professor of medicine at the medical school of the University of California,
San Francisco...